They piled dirt over her this morning.
Covered in flowers, with a countenance like an angel, she did not
even protest as they shut the lid. They laid her in the ground and
shoveled freshly turned earth into the abyss. With one well-placed
strike the bulldozer toppled the mound of soil and sent it flowing
like a river over the coffin.

He cannot forgive them. The
noise and the violence would have frightened her. Perhaps she was
screaming and he could not hear her, could never hear her, had not
heard her until it was too late, too late, always and forever too
late. He would have gently dribbled the dirt over her with his
fingers and let it be rain for her, soft and cooling. Would have let
her dream of grey days sitting by the window, like the days when he
and she had been young and he had come to watch her, the most
delicate white flower, blooming against the glass.

They have
no sense of it, no sense of what is gone, of what will never return
again, her clear eyes and gentle smile, her young body, healthy at
long last, well-loved. Oh beloved! I will never forgive them. For you
it should have been a mild spring shower and you would have laughed
and I would have laughed to hear you. Instead it was horror upon
horror, in airless darkness with nothing but the heavens to crumble
down upon you, a callous, unfeeling end.

It will be soon when
he finds the book that will be his undoing. It will be soon that he
takes himself as a sacrifice, the first of many, countless sacrifices
piled at her alter, perfect white bones bleached by the sun. It will
be soon that he silences their voices forever, those men who did not
care that she had screamed and screamed and screamed and died with
blood bubbling in her mouth, with fear in her eyes knowing that
Spring would never come to her again, that rain would never touch her
deep beneath the earth, that they yet lived when she no longer did.
It will be soon that he has his revenge on them, on the unfeeling
world who will not take pity enough on one man to leave him his one
and only happiness. It will be soon that his palms will bleed red,
his fingers skinless and caked with dirt as he scrabbles through six
feet of despair and pries open the top of her casket with his broken
nails. He is quiet, so quiet, she is sleeping and he will not
frighten her awake in the stifling darkness, yet even more he does
not want her to dream. It will be soon that he embraces her in the
dark and murmurs to ears that cannot hear, pressing cold lips to
colder closed eyelids, I have come to bring you back.

A
long black centipede will crawl out of her ear. He will not see it.
His eyes will only see an image of the past and his will will bring
it forth. Dancing Eliza, silent Eliza, Eliza by his side. All of
these are you, my love. All of you are mine. But smiling Eliza is
gone. She has been taken to a world where he cannot yet follow. He
marched into Hell and brought her forth, but faltering, her steps too
soft, he glanced over his shoulder and she faded away like a dream.
That pain, he will think, smiling and smiling as ragged and terrible
claws tear through his insides, piercing that void within his chest,
is his due.

But all that is yet to come.

For now, he
crouches on the floor in the spot where she died and touches the
dried stain of her blood obsessively again and again as he rocks back
and forth on his heels, wildly searching, searching, all the shadows
and cracks in the room for the memory of her. He wills that it is he
and not she beneath the earth, her pale, beautiful face suffering the
ravages of time, of rot, of a thousand little worms burrowing their
way through her perfect skin and flesh, tasting her sweetness as they
eat of her.

He wills that time will stop, that he will
stop, will drop dead here and now and join her in some wretched
afterlife. But he knows that he cannot die. He has failed her in
everything - in death there can be no redemption. Death is absolute.
She does not deserve it. She was too young, too beautiful. What does
one do when one's world has died?

Eliza, he thinks,
and even now the pain is too much.

And yet . . . his heart
beats on and will not stop.

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